31 May 2012 4:09 PM

As far as our leaders and betters are concerned, alcohol is the new tobacco, and we had better get used to the idea now.

If you smoke you have already been turned into an outcast who must leave the building, any public building, to indulge your filthy habit.

Your poison will shortly be supplied under plain wrapper, much like pornography once was. There is pressure to stop you smoking in your own car, and I would not bet that you will continue to be allowed to smoke in your own home.

Welcome to the underclass. Smokers being effectively crushed, the army of those who know what’s good for us is moving on.

Obsessive doctors, politicians who think we need improving, charity researchers earning their money, professional campaigners, well-meaning useful idiots and auxiliary battalions of the just plain bossy are forming up for their next offensive, which is to do the same to drinkers.

If you think drinking alcohol is an ancient cultural custom at the heart of civilised social life in the western world, one which, like many other practices, is sometimes abused, think again. If you drink you are fast becoming a public enemy. The advance guard of the teetotal army is infiltrating everywhere.

We have minimum alcohol prices on the way, to stop those silly poor people drinking their cheap lager and rotgut wine. The legal limit for drink-driving is going to come down, even though dangerous drink-drivers are almost always found to be well over the current limit.

New statistics on alcohol consumption which show that young people are drinking less are interpreted as an indictment of their awful elders who are still drinking, the fools. Even if the young are drinking less, it won’t help them.

There is a country park near where I live which, at this time of year, is a haven for teenagers to gather after school. Since the good weather started, it has also been teeming with police officers and their PCSO buddies, chasing the teenagers.

I have yet to find any group of these teenagers – who all look over 16 to me - who have made enough noise to disturb the foxes, or have left so much as a crisp packet behind them. But, as far as our overworked police force is concerned, they are engaged in anti-social behaviour, because they have with them the odd six-pack of lager or cider.

If they were organising orgies in the bushes, the police wouldn’t bother, and the local NHS would be sending them teams of co-ordinators to dish out condoms. An essential element of any well-designed campaign to outlaw something that lots of us like, and banish those who continue to like it, is frightening scientific research that tells you how dangerous it is.

This week we have a particularly worrying one, which tells you that you should not be drinking more than three glasses of wine a week. This is nicely timed to go along with a review of the Government’s safe drinking limits, the deeply flawed and highly contentious advice that is supposed to tell you the maximum you ought to be drinking.

The new research invites us to push the current level presented to us as safe, roughly a pint and a half of beer a day for men and a large glass of wine for women, right down to those three glasses a week.

Three small glasses, of course. I would not challenge the scientific credentials of those who have produced this report, nor would I question the quality of their research. Couple of points, though.

The British Heart Foundation Health Promotion Research Group at Oxford University has said that if people cut their alcohol consumption to that three small glasses a week, then 4,579 premature deaths from 11 alcohol-influenced medical conditions would be prevented each year. Not 4,578. Not 4,580, but 4,579. Make your own mind up.

You can be sure these figures will be touted around a lot in the coming months. Remember that Downing Street has been spreading the news that if the price of alcohol goes up by 50 pence a unit, then 2000 deaths a year will be saved.

What was that research group again? The British Heart Foundation Promotion Research Group. Why so? Because the British Heart Foundation pays for it. The British Heart Foundation is a medical charity which warns against exceeding Government drink limits and advises people who do not drink against starting.

Its research group at Oxford states openly that one of its objectives is ‘to influence health promotion policy and practice’. The research group also has a policy which says that ‘publicity for its research and views in the popular media can be an important means of achieving one of its key aims: i.e. to influence health promotion policy and practice.’

I think that should have been written in big letters all over the three glasses of wine paper it published in a medical journal, by way of a health warning. Perhaps they could have stuck a graphic picture on too, to make sure the message was driven home.

A white-coated figure with a stethoscope waving a finger, perhaps.

There should be small print on the health warning offering useful advice. Perhaps it could say most doctors agree that if you neither smoke nor drink, you are likely to live forever.

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18 May 2012 1:41 PM

These are tough times, and we must do what we can to look after the deserving but under-rewarded in our society.

Lawyers and dancers, for example.

There was a barrister on the radio this morning complaining about how hard it is for an honest brief to make a living out of the pittance now doled out in legal aid.

I know readers will join me in digging deep into their pockets to help legal aid lawyers who are down to their last second home, yacht and vineyard in Bordeaux. None of us would like to see gowned figures sitting by the cashpoints in Fleet Street holding out their wigs to catch spare change, would we?

Fortunately, there are a number of formal and informal rules that are applied to make sure that the most important key workers supporting our constitution and economy do not beggar themselves while they are concentrating selflessly on preserving our human rights, or some other general good.

Lawyers like to go on and on about access to justice and the legal rights of the poor, which essentially means they think the compensation culture is a good thing and there must be more publicly-subsidised work for lawyers. When they have finished with that, they like to tell us how important it is that legal aid fees are high enough to ensure the poor get good quality representation in court.

They usually get a sympathetic hearing, on account of the people who set the fees and decide which cases deserve a legally-aided leg up into the casino, sorry, the courtroom, tend to be lawyers.

By the way, when is the legal profession going to set up a public inquiry into the way barristers are paying claims firms for work? It’s happening – the Bar Council has acknowledged that – it breaks their professional rules, and it’s almost certainly an offence under the Bribery Act. There must be some reason why it’s a less important crime than, say, hacking a celebrity’s phone.

Local government officials also have rules that ensure they do not get left behind while others prosper. The favourite, also used by councillors when they set their allowances, is to compare themselves with their counterparts in some other authority nearby and discover that they are underpaid.

This plainly fair and sensible system has ensured that town clerks have seen their pay go up at twice the rate of managers in businesses, while some councillors have managed to secure six-figure incomes from the authorities they serve.

My favourite current example is Philip Hygate, chief executive on the Isles of Scilly, who is paid £104,854 a year including pension, plus council house. Mr Hygate’s local government empire covers 2,000 people and one secondary school, which mean he gets around £50 a year for each individual living in the Scillies.

Even football clubs are no longer run like that, unless they have oil-rich sheikhs or Russian oligarchs as owners. The only people who still put up with paying the bills for ridiculous pay spirals arranged by special interest groups are taxpayers and council tax payers.

And licence fee payers.

That’s you and me again, and we are providing a nice fat pay rise for some dancers who think they are hard done by.

It seems that Len Goodman, Bruno Tonioli and Craig Revel Horwood, judges from the Saturday night hit Strictly Come Dancing, have negotiated themselves £20,000 pay rises that take them into the six-figure zone, alongside Mr Hygate.

The BBC had to stump up after the trio learned how much was being paid to judges on The Voice, a Corporation attempt to copy Simon Cowell that has left many viewers underwhelmed. The Voice has cost the BBC £22 million to produce, and at least one of its stars, Will.i.am out of the Black Eyed Peas, is said to be on £600,000.

Since the dancing show is arguably rather more popular than the singing show, its judges were miffed. The extra money may go some way to compensate for the hurt.

I don’t begrudge the dancing show stars their pay rise. Showbusiness is a less stable and secure career than, say, local government, and if you have a hit, you have to milk it. In television terms, £100,000 is peanuts anyway. Better money is to be made in the spin-off activities.

It’s just that I clearly recall that the BBC was cutting back on the pay of its Saturday prime time stars, because of the recession and all that. Not so long ago Bruce Forsyth took a well-publicised haircut of around 20 per cent on his contract for Strictly. Alan Hansen lost a third of his pay, and other Match of the Day pundits likewise.

All right, Hansen is still on £1 million a year, which is decent money for a superannuated centre half who can’t dance or sing, and who has an authentically Scottish demeanour slightly less sunny than that of his countryman Gordon Brown. But it’s the principle of the thing.

Is the BBC cutting its stars’ salaries to set an example, or isn’t it? Is it telling its home-grown celebrities to like it or lump it, go off to ITV or Sky or wherever if you think you’re big enough, or isn’t it? Does it want us to think it is spending our licence fee money as or more carefully than we would spend it ourselves, if we had the choice, or doesn’t it?

These pay rises make it look as if pay restraint at the BBC is just a smokescreen to hide the reality from the sucker public. The good news for the dancing judges has the smell of bad news for the rest of us.

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17 May 2012 3:53 PM

We are, according to Lord Howe, in a terrible mess because we have failed fully to embrace metric measurement.

The Tory grandee told the Lords that this is especially embarrassing in this Olympic year because it gives the impression to visitors that we are a nation living in the imperial past.

Especially to Americans, I imagine.

Lord Howe, champion of metrication for Edward Heath’s government, then Chancellor and Foreign Secretary in the 1980s, is anxious that we should take advantage of his deep understanding of affairs and listen to his advice, and he often gives it.

Here he is on a related subject, in the Lords in October 2000: ‘I speak with the experience of five or six particular years when I worked alongside my noble friend Lady Thatcher. During that time, for most of which I was in the Treasury, the pound moved between $2.45 at one extreme, and near parity at the other.

‘That is the risk to which we are exposed. That is the consequence of claiming to exercise sovereignty over our currency. What kind of sovereignty? In the words of my noble friend, you cannot buck the market.

‘The best way of overcoming that is by putting ourselves, as we can and should do, into a single currency zone and enjoying the immense benefit of stability over the huge bulk of all our commercial transactions, domestic as well as in the European Union. That is a sensible case, and it cannot be overstated or stated too often.’

All right, you can stop laughing now.

I often wonder why Geoffrey Howe rose to such heights and remained in political office for so long. He is very pompous, and, despite his reputation for showing the savagery of a dead sheep, he can be vindictive and nasty. But history does not reflect well on his insight.

All that Europhilia, the admiration for Helmut Kohl, Francois Mitterand and Jacques Delors as they constructed the world-beating new Europe, the undermining of Mrs Thatcher, culminating in the ‘broken bats’ speech that helped do for her, the championing of the ERM? Not much of it stands up to scrutiny in the harsh light of what happened later.

As for the urgency of joining the euro because industry needs exchange rate stability, it’s worth pointing out that this week figures showed that the British car industry has a balance of trade surplus for the first time since the 1970s.

Now he is banging on about metrication. Metrication, Howe told peers this week, was ‘rightly supported by a broad majority of all those who had given the topic serious consideration.’

Pretty much the same broad majority that used to cheer for the euro, I would have thought.

We are, Lord Howe said, divided between a ‘metrically literate elite’ and the ‘rudderless and bewildered’ non-metric masses. These divisions generate ‘consumer confusion, perpetuate safety hazards, and obstruct business efficiency.’

Lord Howe is, as we have seen, an expert on business efficiency.

We must swiftly change over entirely to metric measures to avoid conversion errors and additional costs. It would be madness to go backwards, he said.

People like Lord Howe never reflect that the confusion of which they complain would not had developed if there had been no metrication in the first place. Metric measures were introduced in the 1960s, entirely coincidentally at the same time that governments and Whitehall became determined that Britain must join the EEC.

It has all been vastly expensive and completely unnecessary, except as a means to remove the visible differences between Britain and the countries of continental Europe.

Lord Howe and his contemporaries who got rid of inches and feet and yards and pounds weight, and the visionaries who removed pounds, shillings and pence in favour of decimal currency, destroyed centuries of popular and workable measurement on the basis of the most empty reasoning.

Conversion errors and additional costs? These people didn’t even foresee the coming of the pocket calculator, let alone the arrival of computer technology.

Converting £sd into euros would have been no more difficult an everyday calculation than it has proved to convert our decimalised currently into euros. Feet and inches were never hard for any schoolchild and would not have posed the slightest problem in the age of the BlackBerry.

As many have discovered since the French revolution developed modern metric measures and Napoleon spread them around Europe by force of arms, counting by 10s looks simple but is not necessarily the most natural and easy way to measure things.

The kind of people who are confused by the old measures are children who have been deprived of the chance to learn them.

Like the 10-year-old singing the Sherman brothers’ Mary Poppins song about ‘tuppence a bag’ at school, who had to ask me this week: ‘Dad, what’s tuppence?’

We now have generations of children who have trouble understanding English literature because they do not know the meaning a yard or a furlong or a quart.

I think we should listen to Lord Howe, who says that we cannot continue in the present mess, and it would be madness to go backwards. That’s good enough for me: if Lord Howe says it would be madness to go backwards, back we should go.

We must ban centimetres, metres, litres, hectares, kilograms, and all the rest of it. Local council trading standards officers should be put to work to arrest and charge anybody who talks in tonnes rather than tons. A judicial inquiry must be called to examine the criminal behaviour of BBC executives who have condoned the use of kilometres in place of miles.

We should do like the Americans, who seem to have rubbed on by with their traditional measures without experiencing economic collapse. It is time, in this Olympic year, to consign Geoffrey Howe and all he represents to the failed European past.

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15 May 2012 2:09 PM

For a supposedly free country, we have a lot of words which are for all practical purposes banned from use in polite society.

I don’t mean the kind of thing we get from Russell Brand, who can say anything and does, with the result of boredom for the many and humiliation for some. The Brand brand of free speech gets him invitations from Westminster to talk down to MPs about drugs.

I don’t mean swearing, because there is only one word which remains taboo, and you still hear it regularly on TV, and it can’t be too long before some wannabe Brand makes his or her name by blurting it out on a breakfast show.

The words which really are unwelcome on the television, or in political discussion, or in academic debate, are those which express ideas which the majority of those in positions of influence or power would prefer were not discussed.

Some examples, then. How about the M-word?

You will have heard a certain amount of very self-important talk in recent days about parenting classes. The Government is going to hand out vouchers for them, and so forth. Lots of quangocrats think parenting classes are a very good thing, and that every parent should be made to go to compulsory parenting classes in the same way children must go to school.

Why is this necessary? Well, it’s not, for the majority of families. It’s an attempt to do something about troubled children, who, like it or not, mainly come from single parent families. Very rarely do they come from married families. But no politician or broadcast reporter is going to mention this, because of prejudice against single parents and all that.

The perceived need not to discriminate against single parents has led to overwhelming and ever-present discrimination against marriage, to the point where the word marriage has been purged from state forms and documents.

When politicians do use the word, they misuse it. This is Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone: ‘Marriage is a celebration of love and should be open to everyone.’ No it isn’t, never has been, and never should be, as a study of Oedipus ought to make plain.

Another one? There’s the G-word.

A few years ago some very high-powered studies appeared which said that social mobility, the likelihood of children from poor families escaping their social class, had declined. These studies, based on very expensive and very convincing evidence collected by very well regarded institutions, said that from the 1950s until the 1970s working class children had often been able to rise in the social scale as they grew up. This had ceased happening in the 1980s.

Lots of worthy people scratched their heads as to why. Prejudice and discrimination were blamed. Independent schools were at fault. A popular explanation was the naughty universities, refusing to let in students from working class backgrounds.

The word you were not allowed to mention was grammar, as in schools, the abolition of which was the only major change between 1965 and 1990 which could conceivably explain such a major setback for the aspirations of millions. To do so marked you out as a reactionary or a backwoodsman. It was like doubting global warming at a Green Party conference.

This has now begun slowly to change, in the face of the screamingly obvious case that the closure of schools designed to advance the interests of working class children has acted to damage the interests of working class children.

As Michael Gove memorably pointed out last week, a recent edition of the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show boasted a cast in which everyone in the studio - the presenter, all the guests, and even the pop group - had been privately educated.

One day, perhaps, a working class child will again rise high enough in the social scale to make an appearance on the Andrew Marr Show.

There is, however, reason to celebrate today because one banned word has been allowed back into the dictionaries of the polite and respectable.

For about 30 years, the A-word was frowned upon because adoption was no more than a way of depriving worthy single mothers – see prejudice and discrimination, above – of their babies and handing them to selfish childless married middle-class women.

It was far better to keep the children with their mothers, whose only problem, after all, was lack of money.

This doctrine collapsed in 2008 when the Baby P case showed what happened when Haringey social workers tried to apply it in the real world.

Since Baby P an awful lot more babies have been taken away from inadequate or dangerous mothers and put into state care, and a new Government is trying to persuade social workers that much of the reasoning devised to marginalise adoption is wrong.

In particular, ministers are trying to make the point that race rules which bar adoption of children by new parents of a different race are, well, racist.

At this point up pops Trevor Phillips, head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, to speak the A-word out loud. Mr Phillips said his greatest regret was over adoption.

‘If I had to pinpoint one single thing I would say that I wish when I took over at the CRE I had been more aggressive on the issue of transracial adoption.

‘If I had ordered an inquiry, an investigation, it would have shown pretty clearly that the life chances of children would have been much much better in a family of any race compared to staying in care. I would have then be able to essentially change the policy in local authorities 10 years ago.’

Mr Phillips is being noisily forced out of his quango by Home Secretary Theresa May. Few seem upset. But, given that his chances of another government job seem on the long side, he has nothing to gain from his admission. His honesty could yet do a lot of children some good.

Mr Phillips, by the way, was a North London grammar school boy. His school went comprehensive, but his parents, determined to get their children a good education, moved on. He took his A-levels in their native Guyana at a school modelled closely on English public schools, and progressed to study chemistry at Imperial College in London.

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14 May 2012 2:19 PM

It is usually a warning sign when ministers start lecturing the rest of us on how hard we should be working.

First off, it means they are suggesting that we all suffer from a deep moral failing and that somehow, the work ethic has passed by most of the population. This gives offence, because most people do actually work quite hard.

Rather harder than MPs, many of whom spend an awful lot of time doing no doubt important business in their constituencies. They put in a three-and-a-half day week in Westminster, and do not stint on the long holidays they seem to need to recuperate from all those late-night sessions in the bars.

This is terribly unfair to all those ministers who slaved their way up through the long-hours culture of politics as think tank assistant wonks, party headquarters gofers, ministerial special advisers and general scapegoats, and, finally, compliant backbenchers always ready to sacrifice themselves at their leader’s call.

However, for some reason, the ungrateful public don’t seem to regard all that as proper work.

Secondly, there is a nasty totalitarian smack to the idea of political leaders ordering the masses to do more work, a distinct and unpleasant whiff of Stalin or Mao. I would guess we are a long way from seeing a minister praise the efforts of some local council Hercules or sales department Stakhanov, but there are some worrying signs around.

Who was it advised David Cameron and Nick Clegg to relaunch the Coalition in a tractor factory?

We might also consider which ministers are now advising the rest of us that our only growth strategy is to work hard. Answer: William Hague and Eric Pickles. Two Yorkshiremen, born to be gritty, both leaning to the right and untainted by LibDemocracy. If you wanted to make an organised pitch to natural Tory supporters, they are the acceptable face of the Coalition.

You would have thought they would have been among the members of the Government most sensitive to the reasons why this appeal for elbow grease is going to play badly with the people it is aimed at.

Mr Hague, the Foreign Secretary, declared in a Sunday newspaper that business leaders should be ‘getting on with the task of creating more of those jobs and more of those exports, rather than complaining about it.’

He added that it the Government’s welfare reforms were trying to ‘rescue the work ethic just in the nick of time’ and that people should ‘get on the plane, go and sell things overseas, go and study overseas.’

Mr Pickles, the Communities Secretary, went on a BBC programme to echo this, saying we needed to ‘sell to the world’ and claiming that the Government is cutting red tape by way of help.

That will be why the Queen’s Speech had all those plans about new regulations for more flexitime for parents, then. Business leaders who object have got it all wrong. Their workers will be able to use all the extra time off they get to fly around the world selling things.

Mr Hague could perhaps prevail upon his Cabinet colleagues to stop handing out billions to prop up the euro, because the breakdown of the single currency is the surest way to rebuild stricken European economies so their people can afford to buy things from Britain again.

For those of a certain age, it’s all a bit reminiscent of I’m Backing Britain, a campaign from the late 1960s which began with five Surbiton secretaries who offered to put in an extra half hour without pay every day, in the cause of raising productivity. Prime Minister Harold Wilson endorsed it, dear old Captain Bob Maxwell tried to hijack it, and naturally the union jack T-shirts that suddenly appeared for sale everywhere turned out to have been made in Portugal.

Key achievement of campaign: the 1970s.

Mr Hague is of course right to point to the importance of welfare reforms. But ministers have not yet got us to the point where several million people living on benefits because they do not think it worth their while to look for a job have begun to change their minds.

Nor has the Coalition done anything to lift the overwhelming tax burden on low-paid people. It isn’t just the generous benefits available to those who choose not to work, the problem is the way those who want to work get hammered by the taxman while they are on very modest earnings. Mr Hague knows this.

And if you really want all those middle-earning Tory voters to work harder, than perhaps ministers could do something to reduce the number of people paying higher rate income tax. Their numbers went up by 600,000 this year, and one in eight people are now paying a tax once reserved only for the genuinely high-paid.

In the old Soviet empire, nobody actually did any work at all, because money had no value. The watchword of the socialist worker was: they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.

If Mr Cameron’s ministers want us all to work harder, stop taking so much of the money we earn. Give us something to work for.

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11 May 2012 1:44 PM

Here we have a country where the banking system has reached the point of collapse. The Madrid government has a plan to ensure this doesn’t happen which involves requiring its banks to stump up around £25 billion. This is a kind of cash bond to make sure they can afford to keep up with their loan repayments.

It’s a really good idea, except the banks don’t have two euros to rub together.

At this point, the Spanish government declares that it is upset and unhappy. Nothing, however, to do with any passing minor financial hitches. No, this concerns the serious matter of a visit to Gibraltar by a couple of minor English royals.

Here is the official statement released on behalf of the Foreign Policy Director at the Madrid Foreign Ministry following a meeting with the British ambassador: 'In the course of their conversation and among other subjects, Mr Cabanas Ansorena took the opportunity to express his government's upset and unhappiness over the visit by the Earl and Countess of Wessex to Gibraltar between June 11 and 13.'

I submit that you can tell when a country is really getting into deep trouble by the point at which it starts directing the attention of its people towards an imperialist bogeyman.

African dictators have practiced this as a matter of routine for decades. You refer to their wars, civil wars, coups, murderous politics, universal corruption and general lack of any redeeming features, they will blame the evil British imperialist. Said imperialist may have pulled down his flag and gone home 50 years ago, but it’s the awful legacy, you see.

We have grown accustomed to Argentina’s habit of getting aggressive over the colonial occupation of the Malvinas every time inflation hits the pockets of the population, which is often.

It can work for political parties in some circumstances. Alex Salmond’s vision of an independent Scotland may have crumbled in every respect from his arc of prosperous small countries – like Iceland and Ireland – through his marvellously successful banking industry to his alliance with Rupert Murdoch. But whose fault is it? Altogether now: the English.

Forget the side-splitting irony of Spain, of all countries, complaining about imperialism by others. Its claim to Gibraltar is in any case empty.

The rock has been British by treaty for nearly 300 years, and its people are unanimously determined to stay British. While Spain firmly demands control of Gibraltar, different rules seem to apply when it comes to the disputed Spanish enclaves in Morocco. The people of Ceuta and Melilla wish to remain Spanish, and their views are for some reason listened to in Madrid.

The strongest lobby for returning Gibraltar to Spain is to be found in Whitehall, where the Foreign Office regards the territory as a nuisance, its people as raffish, and its continued Britishness an offence to the approved European policy of surrender first and tell everybody later.

A few years ago Tony Blair was tempted to go along with this, but changed his mind when he discovered how popular a handover of Gibraltar would be.

The Spanish might do well to ask the Monty Python question about imperialism – what have the Romans ever done for us? In the case of the British in Spain, pumped many billions into the economy through tourism, retirees and expats. British and German money are the main reasons why Spain had a worthwhile property market at all, before it ever grew into a particularly transparent bubble and a particularly horrible bust.

Spain has always relied on getting exactly what it wants out of the EU, from other peoples’ fishing grounds to vast subsidies for roads, railways and factories. Now it has a 50 per cent youth unemployment rate, banks which can neither borrow nor lend, and the prospect of a Brussels-enforced austerity programme which will foster political unrest on a scale unknown since the 1930s.

Its leaders could never bring themselves to do the only thing that could save them: bite the hand that has fed them so well and abandon the euro.

The answer of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is to try to work up a little popular outrage because the Prince Edward plans to visit Gibraltar next month.

Spain is supposed to be a serious country. The decision of its government to play the Gibraltar card now is the clearest possible signal that it is broke and its ambitions are played out.

There is one bright chapter in this sad story, and it is about the dog that didn’t bark.

Once upon a time, Ireland would have been among the chorus complaining about British imperialism. Irish politicians, journalists and intellectuals would bang on about how its economy needed to be freed from the baleful grip of Britain, and how it had to make common cause with an anti-imperialist EU bloc including Greece and Portugal.

Portugal not imperialist? No, they really used to say that.

Some cause would have been found in Dublin for a dispute with London.

We are not hearing that sort of talk from Ireland today. It is probably the first time since 1921 that Ireland is not blaming Britain for its troubles. The country is taking its medicine and trying to work its way out of trouble. That just might be winning Ireland some new credibility in the world.

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10 May 2012 2:56 PM

Tim Larkin is a very dangerous man, or so he tells us. He is a martial arts instructor who claims to have adapted tactics from the Navy Seals, a military unit that has long been extremely popular with Hollywood producers. Mr Larkin advises that you must inflict crippling pain on an attacker and learn to kill. His website offers for sale DVDs about how to break ribs, rupture kidneys, and splinter wrists. This all sounds well hard, so when Mr Larkin proposed a sales tour of Britain, taking in some of last summer’s best-known riot venues, Home Secretary Theresa May became alarmed. The 47-year-old, described as a former military intelligence officer and expert in hand-to-hand combat, was told as he prepared to board a plane that he was banned from the country. It might tell us something that Mr Larkin’s flight to London was departing from Las Vegas, not, as far as I am aware, a city with strong links to the military nor one with any great naval tradition. Mr Larkin appears to be an unsavoury successor to Charles Atlas, the body-building guru of a million 20th century comics, who promised to teach us weaklings how to avoid having sand kicked in our face, get the girls, and so on. The main difference is that Mr Larkin glories in descriptions of extreme violence. His core message, that you can generate great force with the right fighting technique, is an insight he shares with the average eight-year-old in the karate class at your local council leisure centre, all Olympic martial arts competitors, and n million kung fu movie fans, where n tends to infinity. So why did Mrs May ban him from the country? He’s just an old fashioned showman and snake-oil salesman, and so what if he glories in violent talk? The last time I looked there was no law against bad taste. If there were, a few prime time TV shows would be off the air. The idea that he is going to persuade Tottenham’s finest neets, gangstas and drug dealers to abandon their knives and guns in favour of removing people’s kidneys with their bare hands is a little far-fetched. Last time I noticed Abu Qatada was still in the country, and, from what we have heard in recent days, the possibility that one or two of his old pals might still harbour the ambition of blowing up the odd airliner is not so far-fetched. We let in Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi to join Ken Livingstone as the then London mayor’s guest at City Hall in 2004. Al-Qaradawi is is accused of advocating the suicide bombing of Israeli civilians, the execution of male homosexuals, and the ‘light’ beating of disobedient wives. We let in Bounty Killer, a Jamaican singer who glorifies gang violence and incites murder against gays. We let in Sun Myung Moon, aged leader of a loathsome cult, who still dreams of rebuilding his organisation to the strength it enjoyed in Britain before it made the mistake of bringing a libel case against the Daily Mail, which called it ‘the church that breaks up families’. Moon lost, and his cult has never recovered in this country. There can only be one reason for the ban on Larkin, and it’s the pompous and self-serving conceit held by our criminal justice authorities that no-one may take the law into their own hands. Their prevailing doctrine holds that no-one may fight back against an attacker. You must wait for the forces of law and order to come and do it properly. Rather than defend yourself, surrender your goods. You have in any case provoked your assailant by advertising your wealth. You can’t expect to drive around in a nice car without expecting someone to steal the briefcase off the back seat. Thieves only steal because you are flaunting your property in front of them. Someone who is a victim of poverty and disadvantage has every reason to put it right with a little freelance redistribution. Your iPhone is a naked display of inequality certain to provoke someone who hasn’t got one, because the last one they stole has been sold to buy drugs. So just lie down and let your assailant rummage through your backpack. A Community Support Officer will be along in half an hour or so to offer you a counselling service. This is no more than a mild exaggeration of the official thinking that really goes on, and its purpose is to reinforce the power of police chiefs, the Crown Prosecution Service, probation officers, the whole circus of the law courts, and all the rest of the hangers on. The worst crime is to defy the criminal justice establishment, and defending yourself comes into that category. This ideology is far more dangerous to the everyday safety of civilised people than a thousand Tim Larkins. In their rush to reinforce the dignity of the police, Mrs May and her officials have blundered into the usual mistake of authorities who act on their repressive instincts without thinking. Does nobody in the Home Office remember how it was that Serge Gainsbourg and the Sex Pistols got to the top of the pop charts? If you want to make something popular, ban it. Mr Larkin’s website is currently warning of delays in shipping DVDs to Britain because of a sudden boom in demand for his products. Mrs May’s ban has given Larkin an audience he could never in a million years have reached on his own.

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09 May 2012 4:06 PM

When we consider the mess that the system for looking after frail old people has sunk into, we need to cast around for a scapegoat. And I am afraid that, as in so many other cases, it is John Major who fits the frame.

On becoming Prime Minister, Mr Major was determined to replace the excesses of Thatcherism with neat, rational, intelligent, fair-minded, modern Toryism. The result, of course, was chaos.

My favourite memory is of a salesman I knew who was trying to persuade the Department for Education and Science to part with ten thousand or so for a corporate video, then at the height of fashion in the public sector. She wound up pitching not to the junior official you would expect, but to the Secretary of State.

Why would Ken Clarke, at the time in charge of a budget of around £27 billion, want to get involved in anything so trivial? It turned out he had to, because Mr Major had a brainchild called the Citizen’s Charter, which was going to transform the ethos of public service. The video was going to be part of it, and all Cabinet ministers had better show interest or else.

This is why we remember Mr Major so well as the man who gave us the efficient and effective public services we have today.

When it came to care homes, Mr Major was motivated by the way middle class families had been taking advantage of the benefits system. From 1980 onwards, it had been possible to claim Supplementary Benefit, the forerunner of our modern Income Support, to pay for your bed and board in a care home.

As a result an awful lot of families were claiming benefit to pay for granny or granddad’s care home bills.

Mr Major was told that it would be better to spend state money on helping people stay out of care homes.

So, in 1993, he withdrew the benefit from care home residents, and gave more money to councils with the idea that they would use it to help vulnerable old people stay in their own homes.

There have been a number of effects of this. Not least, local authorities have cut back care for people in their own homes to the point where in order to qualify for free meals on wheels you have to be dead. This has left a few hundred thousand extremely needy people at all income levels with very serious problems.

But the withdrawal of benefit from middle class care home residents has stopped being neuralgic for Mr Major’s successors and is now downright corrosive.

The typical story goes like this. Your widowed granny works all her life, then one day she falls over and goes into hospital. The outlook is poor, and the social worker and the doctor tell you she ought to go into a care home.

You discover that the bill will be £600 a week and the NHS isn’t paying. Granny is going to be means tested, in the way she hoped would never happen again after her parents were subjected to the means test in the 1930s.

She starts getting help towards her bill from the local council when her wealth is down to £23,250. This means her house, worth £150,000, is going to be sold to pay the bills, whether she and you like it or not. If she lives for four years, her money is gone, and nuts to your inheritance.

Now who was the Tory Prime Minister who promised he would let wealth ‘cascade down the generations’? Right first time: John Major, in the very year he introduced our popular social care system.

There is another sting in all this, which is that granny’s benefit-dependent neighbour gets all her care home fees paid by the council. Your granny, who paid her taxes to keep the neighbour in televisions and Spanish holidays , is now spending her life savings to get the same treatment the neighbour gets for free.

By the way, the council is using its bulk buying power to depress the fees it pays for granny’s indigent neighbour. The care home owner is compensating for this by jacking up your granny’s bill.

If you wanted a machine to spread disenchantment among Tory voters, you could not build a better.

This is a terrible trap for governments, because climbing out of it would be very, very expensive. Tony Blair called a Royal Commission to come up with answers, then retreated at the thought of the cost. Mr Cameron called in Andrew Dilnot, his favourite economist, to do the same job.

Dilnot recommended a cap on how much anyone should have to spend on their own care bills, possibly £50,000. He called for the means test threshold to be raised to £100,000.

The big old age charities have been campaigning powerfully, perhaps heavy-handedly, for the Dilnot recommendations to be put into effect, and for billions to be pumped back into the system that gives care at home. They would, wouldn’t they?

Some think tanks, including the Centre for Social Justice founded by Iain Duncan Smith, have been warning Mr Cameron off. The money could be better spent, or not spent at all, they say.

Mr Cameron has now promised a Social Care Bill. But the Queen’s Speech told us nothing about the central question, which is who is going to pay? We are going to have to wait for a social care white paper in the summer, which may or may not be another kick for the long grass.

Middle class people, by and large, do not mind paying their share. But they do not like people taking the mickey. In England, they do not like seeing their taxes go towards subsidising the care home bills run up by their counterparts in Scotland.

Mr Cameron cannot afford to throw huge sums of money at the care system. He can try to make some reality of the Big Society by encouraging charities and private saving to do more.

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08 May 2012 3:53 PM

However hard-boiled they may be, politicians still tend to arrive in government with fine dreams of the difference they are going to make to the world. There are various ways to tell when the dreams are dying.A classic is the sudden invention of an on-the-spot fine that is going to punish wrongdoers and put things to right at a stroke. Tony Blair had one of these in July 2000, when he had been in power for just over three years. There were going to be £100 on-the-spot fines for drunken louts. Police officers were to be given powers to march anti-social youths to the nearest cashpoint and force them to cough up the money.Cynics thought there might be a flaw or two in this plan.For some reason I was spending the day chasing Mr Blair around a small town in Germany, where he was giving a speech of extraordinary vapidity about religion. I had the opportunity to ask Alastair Campbell about the cashpoint scheme, but I can’t tell you how he explained it, because all I got was a few minutes of sweary abuse.Sadly for Mr Blair, this tactic failed to work on police chiefs, who killed the idea off in a hurry, to the accompaniment of mockery on all sides.It is not necessarily good news for Mr Cameron’s Coalition that a similar plan is now being brought in to deal with benefit cheats.There will be on-the-spot fines of up to £2,000, according to the version ladled out in one popular newspaper today. There will be ‘tough new fines’ even for those who steal only small amounts, and welfare reform minister Lord Freud added: ‘No one will escape justice with a mere slap on the wrists.’Some will think Lord Freud optimistic, but, in fairness, his fines are not a matter of Blairite smoke and mirrors. They have actually reached the statute book, in the new Welfare Reform Act. As you would expect from anything connected with the benefits system, they are not quite as simple as they have been sold.For a start, these are not on-the-spot fines. They are ‘administrative penalties’, which, in the case of benefit dependent cheats, will amount to the Department of Work and Pensions claiming back some of its own money. Or, more accurately, our own money.There are a range of new punishments, which include a £350 fine for benefit fraud, or, if it comes to more, half of the amount stolen up to £2,000. Some offenders will be banned from receiving benefits, for up to three years in the case of gang members engaged in organised fraud.A new ‘civil penalty’ of £50 will be introduced to deal with cases in which claimants accidentally on purpose fail to tell their benefit office that their boyfriend has moved in, or that they have got a new better paid job, and so on. All very laudable. Trouble is, it won’t make much difference, and the Department of Work and Pensions knows it.I know they know because these days when ministries bring in new legislation they pump out documents called ‘impact assessments’. Ministers do not do much to encourage you to read these. This is because more often than not, the impact assessment will tell you far more about some politician’s grand scheme than his speeches, his press releases, his interactive DVDs, his specially-launched website, and all the briefings Whitehall can muster.In this case the impact assessment on fraud penalties and sanctions from the DWP and Revenue and Customs announces that ‘the annual cost of welfare benefit fraud and error, including tax credits, is assessed to be £5.3 billion’.It goes on to estimate that the grand savings total achieved by the new penalties over the next three years will amount to £73 million. Net savings will be £45 million, presumably because of the cost of running the tough new system.So, by the end of March 2015 the not quite on-the-spot fines will have saved us £15 million a year from £5.3 billion. I get nervous with big numbers, so I could be wrong, but I make this just over a quarter of one per cent. It is safe to say that Lord Freud’s worthy efforts won’t be reducing our taxes by much.The supposedly tough fines are no more than tinkering, and the Coalition is fighting shy of reforms that would really make a difference to the benefits system and make a serious dent in benefit fraud. Let’s take an example: how about the couple penalty, the notorious benefit bias in favour of single people and single parent families? This can mean a single mother loses £200 a week if her partner moves in with her. We have a million couples thought to be ‘living apart together’ because it would cost them too much to live as a proper family.A couple of months ago Lord Freud was lecturing people who fail to tell the DWP they are shacked up with someone. ‘Pretending you a single parent to get benefits when you are actually living with a partner is stealing money from the people who genuinely need help,’ he announced.Well, how about changing the welfare system so that benefit-dependent single parents are no longer much better off than couples who try to raise their children together? Or would that be too much like a real welfare reform?

02 May 2012 12:44 PM

It’s a shame, because while boxing is certainly brutal and professional boxers who stay in the trade too long risk lifetime damage, it is a sport with a fine tradition.

The history of boxing remains of deep importance in the working class districts of British cities. It is of particular importance to black people, since boxers were the among the first black sportsmen to wreck generally-held assumptions of white superiority.

There are thinking social activists who believe a revival in the popularity of boxing could do a lot to help ill-educated and drifting young men who would otherwise be likely to slip into drug abuse, crime and so on. I know Iain Duncan Smith has sympathy with that view.

Perhaps the sports managers at the BBC think boxing is crude and horrid and to be discouraged, if not banned. According to the Corporation’s website, its coverage of boxing over the forthcoming week will be limited to the general sports programme on Radio Merseyside.

There is an exception to this rule, which is of course the Olympics. For some reason the International Olympics Committee hasn’t got around to banning boxing, so there are going to be hours and hours of free-to-air televised bouts this summer.

I know professional boxing isn’t exactly entirely free of controversy. Some of what goes on is hilarious – check out the man in the hat who turned up playing with the scorecards while British contender Amir Khan was losing on points in a world title fight in Washington last December. But there is no excuse for giving such huge favouritism to Olympic boxing just because it is the Olympics.

Just because it is the Olympics, however, is the rule which is going to govern BBC scheduling this July and August. We are going to get plenty of Olympics, like it or not.

BBC1 is to be devoted to almost continuous coverage of the games, six in the morning until midnight. There are to be 24 special HD channels, just so nobody needs to miss a minute of anything. There are 765 staff accredited to work for the BBC at the games, a number which exceeds the 550 competitors in the British team.

So those who like boxing will get loads of it. So will fans of taekwondo, shooting, wrestling, water polo, fencing, and gymnastics-artistic. There will be archery, synchronised swimming, and, for real connoisseurs of sporting talent, beach volleyball.

Can this breadth of coverage, and the expense necessary to produce it, really be justified? Boxing is ignored outside of the Olympics, and all these other sports I have mentioned are minority events which please only competitors and a handful of followers. The definition of some as sport at all is extremely contentious.

In the ordinary course of events, they would be lucky to get a three-minute feature slot on Thursday night on Radio Merseyside.

Handball wouldn’t even get that. It is played mainly in Scandinavia and Germany, first became an Olympic sport at the 1936 Berlin games, and returned in 1972, when the games were in Munich. The British following is so small that last autumn the British Handball Association had to advertise for potential players who fancied having a go at the London games.

I would guess the average home audience figures for the BBC’s comprehensive high definition coverage of the Olympic handball tournament are unlikely to run far into three figures.

You might ask how the BBC, which is supposed to be making large-scale savings and which is trying to shed 2,000 staff, can afford all this. It turns out that the Corporation has squirrelled away £140 million of licence fee payers’ money, which is now a reserve to help finance coverage of the Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

Funny nobody has noticed the effect of all that missing money on the programmes.

I am not a production accountant, but I don’t think it would be wrong to guess that the amount of this fund that will go on the Olympics will be many times the amount devoted to the Jubilee.

Personally, I would lose the handball and spend the money on something else.

If the BBC were to reimburse each licence fee payer, that would come to £5.38 apiece. It’s a pie and a pint, and I’m not going to sneer at that.

Perhaps the Corporation would do better to cut back the coverage of wrestling and shooting, and give the money to the Home Office to spend on the UK Border Force. It would pay the salaries of more than 3,000 passport officers to check arrivals at Heathrow for at least two years.

Now that might do something helpful for the Olympics, and for the rest of us too.